Part 1: Lost

It is remarkable how the ordinary and the existential are always stuck together.

This is the essential avaricious nature of loss: it encompasses, without distinction, the trivial and the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone.

A lost waller, a lost treasure, a lost father, a lost species: as different as these were, they and every other missing thing suddenly seemed fundamental to the problem of how to live– seemed, in being gone, to have something urgent o say about being here.

He had a prodigious memory, a panoptic curiosity, and an ability, in the face of problems of all kinds, to distinguish what was irrelevant from what mattered as swiftly as a coin machine separates pennies from quarters.

In the end, this may be why certain losses are so shocking: not because they defy reality but because they reveal it. One of the many ways that loss instructs us is by correcting our sense of scale, showing us the world as it really is: so enormous, complex, and mysterious that there is nothing too large to be lost- and conversely, no place too small for something to get lost there.

Like awe and grief, to which it is closely related, loss has the power to instantly resize us against our surroundings; we are never smaller and the world never larger than when something important goes missing.

It forces us to confront the limits of our will: the fact that we are powerless to protect the things we love from time and change and chance. Above all, it forces us to confront the limits of existence: the fact that sooner or later, it is in the nature of almost everything to vanish or perish. Over and over, loss calls on us to reckon with this universal impermanence– with the baffling, maddening, heart-breaking fact that something that was just here can be, all of a sudden, just gone.

He was incurring losses of a different kind– the kind that, for immigrants and refugees, are often the price of making a home in a new place.

But to be prepared is not to be spared.

The devout may view death as an important transformation or a welcome homecoming, while the secular may see it as both morally and psychologically necessary because a life that went on forever would be devoid of meaning

All of this makes dying sound meaningful and sweet- and it is true that, if you are lucky, there is a seam of sweetness and meaning to be found within it, a vein of silver in a dark cave a thousand feet underground.

Yet, at the time, these mishaps and maladies felt less like an ongoing psychosomatic calamity that like a pervasive loss of balance, as if I were no longer on familiar terms with the basic physical operations of my body and the world.

C. S Lewis “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect you don’t understand.

Part of what makes grief so seductive, then, is that it seems to offer us what life no longer can: an ongoing, emotionally potent connection to the dead. And so it is easy to feel that once that bleak gift is gone, the person we love will somehow be more gone too.

This type of circular mourning, the grieving of grief itself, is perfectly normal and possibly inevitable yet also misguided and useless.

To be bereft is to live with the constant presence of absence.

Grief confuses us by spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left. But of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies, it’s the future.

They are still here, unlike him, and I assume they always will be, as enduring as the love that made them. This is the fundamental paradox of loss: it never disappears.

Part 2: Found

“Picture a silvery cord reaching from your chest all the way our to your lost object. Kaikeyi – Vaishnavi Patel

“How will you look for it,” he asks Socrates, “when you do not know at all what it is? ” And, “if you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing which you did not know?”

Meno’s paradox: if you do not know what you are looking for, you can’t find it. And if you do know what you are looking for, you don’t need to search for it. As a result, you should never bother looking for anything, because your search will either be unnecessary or impossible.

Many other scientists and mathematicians, from Barbara McClintock to Albert Einstein, have likewise reported finding answers through sudden flashes of insight that then took weeks, months, or years to verify.

Thinking Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman, When We Cease to Understand the World – Benjamin Labatut

In general, any longing in love – physical, emotional, intellectual, existential – is always the longing for more.

Love, like grief, has the properties of a fluid: it flows everywhere, fills any container, saturates everything.

The difficult lesson I learned in my previous relationship was that there is a limit to how close you can get to people who do not care about the same questions you do, not through any failure on their part but simply because their minds orient along different meridians than yours.

On Going Home: Somehow, it is simultaneously such a fundamental part of myself that I can’t imagine being without it, yet so very unlike me that I can’t imagine ever choosing to live there.

By then, she lived, like so many people who venture far from their roots, in two largely non-intersecting worlds. Certain core parts of herself were invisible, or inexplicable to most of the people she had grown up with; others were opaque or alien to those she met as an adult.

Our parents, she said, had given us a love of ideas, and the idea of love.

How even at the extremes of human experience, rejoicing or grieving, in paradise or newly expelled from it, we are still just another lowly creature at the mercy of the world.

Aristotle by contrast, regarded Happiness as the “supreme good”, and understood it as something less like transient gratification that like full human flourishing, inextricable from thoughtfulness, inextricable from virtue.

James Baldwin And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time, and furthermore, to win.

Part 3: And

“And” does none of the things other conjunctions do. It is a connection made of nothing but connection.

William James: “consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree.”

We are all simul justus et peccator: at once righteous and sinning

We live with both at once, with many things at once– everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything.

It is impossible to overstate how emotionally, ethically, and intellectually impaired we would be if we could not perceive connections among seemingly dissimilar things.

David Hume: “All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by senses and experiences.”

Comprehension emerges when we can see the links between things learning

“How fortunate I have been– and yet I wanted it to last longer.”

Whether are not we ever have children, that we are here above all as caretakers, a role as essential as it is temporary.

Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better us of our finite days. Our crossing is a brief one, best spent bearing witness to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, tending what we know needs our care, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone.

We are here to keep watch, not to keep.